John Coltrane and A Love Supreme, Fifty Years Later

What the jazz giant left behind.

By
Michael J. Agovino

Nov 19, 2015

John Coltrane released his most-celebrated work A Love Supreme in 1965. It became one of the best-selling jazz recordings in history, and in 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it 47th in its list of Top 500 albums. Coltrane attracted not only fans and admirers—Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Steve Reich, Gil Scott-Heron ("…until our hero rides in, rides in, on his saxophone…"), Bono, and Carlos Santana, who paid tribute in 1973's Love Devotion Surrender with John McLaughlin—but something akin to followers (and not the ephemeral Twitter kind).

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For such an epic piece—a four-part suite that is, in Coltrane's words on the original record jacket, "an attempt to say THANK YOU GOD…", the all-caps his—it's a mere 32 minutes and change. That's it. Coltrane had solos longer than that at the Half Note. (No, really.)

There had to have been more to the story, and more music. And there was. In 2002, Impulse! released a deluxe CD set with a few alternate takes and a ferocious live performance of A Love Supreme from July 26, 1965, in Juan-les-Pins, France, that ended with some boos. (It was, by chance, a day after Bob Dylan was booed at Newport.) In 2003, music historian Ashley Kahn wrote the book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album.

Now comes, on November 20, A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters (Impulse!), occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary. If the skeptic in you rolls your eyes at such re-issued box sets (especially this time of year) and/or at certain specious anniversaries, you'd be within reason. On the other hand, the half-century mark seems a worthy time to reflect, as Coltrane is as important as virtually any other American musician of the 20th Century.

Smithsonian Archives

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Consider what's included in this set: the original recording; the live performance from France once again, at a more fully-realized 49 minutes; still more alternate takes, some for a sextet version Coltrane wrote with an additional bass player, Art Davis, and Archie Shepp, a second tenor; the reprinted Coltrane poem, A Love Supreme, the piece's raison d'être; his self-penned liner notes written directly to his listeners (in his own handwriting); a booklet with reproduced contact sheets and photographs of Coltrane and his immortal quartet of Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison in Rudy Van Gelder's fabled, chapel-like Englewood Cliff's studio; copies of some of his written sheet music (with doodles in the margins); an excellent essay by Kahn; and a short excerpt from Carlos Santana's 2014 memoir on what A Love Supreme meant to him. It's what you might find in a scholarly archive. It's clear Impulse! not only cares deeply about Coltrane (and, yes, making money), but also cares about Coltrane-obsessives (Coltrane-heads?).

Another reason it's worth looking back at A Love Supreme is that race was a dominant theme in 1965, as it is today. Not mentioned in the booklet is that the second day of the recording session, December 10, 1964, (the year of the Civil Rights Act) was the same day Martin Luther King, Jr. accepted his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, hence the era's optimism. Then the madness: The album was released in February 1965, a few days after Malcolm X was assassinated, a few weeks before Bloody Sunday. Coltrane had his eyes wide open. In 1963, he composed a haunting piece called "Alabama," one of his best, as a remembrance to the four girls killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In March of '65, he played at New York's Village Gate in the New Black Music concert organized by Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones). A few months later, his classic quartet disbanded, and Coltrane was at the epicenter of the Free Jazz movement. Two years later, he died, at age 40. Some say jazz never recovered. Some. Not everyone was enthralled; Ralph Ellison wasn't a fan. Albert Murray gives Coltrane only scant mention in his magnificent Stomping The Blues. And the English poet Philip Larkin, who dabbled in jazz criticism throughout the 1960s, excoriated the tenorist. "With Coltrane metallic and passionless nullity gave way to exercises in gigantic absurdity, great boring excursions on not-especially-attractive themes during which all possible changes were rung, extended investigations of oriental tedium, long-winded and portentous demonstrations of religiosity."

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Bill Wagg

Even Coltrane's former boss Miles Davis, according to Ashley Kahn, asked, "What is that he's playing?" after watching him at one of his residencies at the Half Note. Other jazz musicians, especially younger ones, revered Coltrane—he was a kind, generous soul by all accounts—as did soon-to-be rock musicians, likely turned on, as the '60s became "the '60s," by his ecstatic intensity and sheer abandon. Artists found him enigmatic and fascinating: In Roy DeCarava's 1996 retrospective at MoMA, there were no less than five photographs of Coltrane from the 1960s; there's also a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting called "John Coltrane" from 1981 and a 1968 Bruce Nauman sculpture entitled "John Coltrane Piece."

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As intriguing as the new, unearthed sextet alt takes are on The Complete Masters, one thing is clear (at least to me): Coltrane, along with his wife, Alice, a musician and accomplished bandleader, vetted and edited the material with great care and selected the versions of each movement that needed to be selected. It is, after all, his personal declaration to god.

Gilles Petard

"To which god?" as Ben Ratliff, author of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, once asked. "Any and all." Indeed Coltrane said, "I believe in all religions," and a worthy future anthology might be The Spiritual Side of John Coltrane. (There's already The Gentle Side of John Coltrane, don't forget.) With his songs like "Dear Lord," "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,""Dearly Beloved," and "Om," to name just a few, plus Ascension, another album-length suite (which Shepp and Art Davis appeared on later in 1965), it's a wonder these haven't been collected in a multi-disc volume. (And Impulse!, I'll joyously accept royalties.)

Until then, as A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters illustrates, John Coltrane was, and remains, a gift, one that not only keeps on giving, but one that's worth the same ongoing examination, and re-examination, as all deadly serious art.

Michael J. Agovino is the author of The Bookmaker and The Soccer Diaries. He can be followed @soccerdiarist.